People in Poverty
Poverty includes all elements such as social, economic, political issues. This results in hunger, social inequality, unequal opportunities, greedy and powerful corporations that invest in their own special interests through lobbying, wars, and others. The primary source to poverty is due to people in power using their agenda, their political interests, and their goal for their own gain.
Around the world, in rich or poor countries, poverty has always been present. People are deprived of basic human needs, such as food, water, sanitation, clothing, shelter, and health care. Although they can be easily helped through humanitarian effort, government officials and other higher ups do not want this to happen. In many cases when the West sends aid to poor countries such as North Korea or other African countries, it goes to rich people in poor countries instead of the starving populace.
If we take a look at the countries that tend to have large population that are in poverty, it is usually consists of incompetent, corrupt governments, poor labor standards, an economic system that is set up to make people in poverty unable to advance to lower class. It is very difficult for people to bounce up to another social class to due to their status having poor education, lack of support, knowledge, and money.
Another reason is powerful corporations that affect the impoverished. For example, Nestle has taken over the water supplies of many African villages leaving spring water to their hands to sell. They privatize water and completely block off natural water sources in some of Africa’s poorest countries such as in parts of South Africa, Ethiopia, and Pakistan. This resulted in many, many deaths of the local population and village was forced to buy their water. The CEO of Nestle believes that access to water is not a basic human right.
Also, they aggressively promoted its baby formula in poor areas, even telling it was better for their babies. They gave samples to poor mothers, who used it, and then had to continue using it because their milk supplies had since dried up. Nestle did this in areas where it was known that most people lack access to clean water, which is necessary to safely administer formula. When the free samples ran out, the families could not afford the high costs of formula and mothers have already lost access to their free breast milk and resulted in malnourished babies.
Another big reason is inclusiveness because the people in poverty are stuck in their impoverished social circle due to repeated cycle of having little to no education and lack the knowledge to live. They are either unemployed or have a poor quality job that limit access to a decent income and cuts people off from social networks. They are from low levels of education and skills which limit people’s ability to access decent jobs to develop themselves and participate fully in society.
I believe the solutions for these types of issues is to have open hands and ears to the communities from all social classes including to those in poverty. In today’s society, we seem to have this stigma that being poor is due to laziness or incompetency, which in some case, is true, however, there is a deep, in depth, reason for why people cannot escape poverty. This often results in segregated communities and they are not heard in public. People need to improve their thinking about the poor class and reach out to them. In order to improve poverty, we need to be aware of many actions that corporations like Nestle do and stop them through raising awareness and boycotting. Also, encourage voluntary works and charities to help those in need of basic things like water, shelter, food, and others. We also need to tackle the long term issues and have more educated community. Knowledge is the most powerful tool for any human being and if we set up proper and well-structured schools, we can have a stronger poor class ready to enter the workforce. With